Author: John Koetsier

Mobile Ad Fraud Tutorial Series: What is Deceptive App Advertising Fraud?

Mobile ad fraud is on the mind of virtually every app marketer. While estimates vary, few dispute the assertion that app fraud costs our industry hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

To help app marketers better understand and respond to app fraud, Singular has launched a series of app fraud tutorial posts.

This post continues that series, providing information on mobile app fraud types, how they can harm your business, and how to protect yourself from specific types of app fraud. Here we also provide a topline summary of how Singular protects its clients from various forms of app fraud, and how you can learn more about the Singular fraud protection difference. Today’s post is about deceptive advertising app fraud. Deceptive app advertising refers to situations where a bad actor media partner creates and delivers a false advertising message to drive up campaign performance metrics and capture the maximum amount of brand marketing investment spending.

———–
Download the Singular Fraud Index

Singular has just released its 2017 Singular Fraud Index, which reveals the mobile industry’s Most Secure Ad Networks. The Index is the first study of its kind to examine ad fraud data collected from multiple ad fraud prevention solutions, each with its own set of proprietary detection methods. Drawing on this unique dataset, the study exposes the effectiveness of today’s most common anti-fraud mechanisms as well as the 25 ad networks driving the lowest rates of digital advertising fraud.

Get your free copy here.
———–

Savvy marketers know that the ads for their install and remarketing campaigns need to showcase the utility of their offerings, but be truthful. Deceptive app ad fraud usually occurs when a marketing team contracts with an ad network that makes its own ads in support of the marketer’s objective. Sometimes that forewarn clients that they want to make special ads for their properties that they believe will perform better than client supplied creative. Other times, they don’t provide notification to the client at all.

Deceptive App Ads and Fraud

Deceptive app ads are designed to drive higher response rates that will improve campaign metrics for a network. Some examples of deceptive app install ads include:

  • Ads that are deliberatively designed to mimic app UI
  • Messages designed to look like alerts or warnings from the user’s device
  • Creative executions that appear to be government warnings or messages
  • Advertising benefits that are not actually delivered by the app
  • Ads that use trickery or adult images to drive extra clicks and installs
  • Ads that offer rewards for installs that are never actually delivered

As you can see, many of these tactics represent both a consumer fraud and a fraud scam against the business.

While deceptive app ads can result in more of the desired consumer action, like installs, they are usually developed and fielded without a review by the client. For example, the publisher of an anti-virus app might contract with a network to drive quality installs, only to learn later that they created their own ads for the app that erroneously implied that the user’s device was already infected and that the only way to solve the problem is to download the client’s app immediately.

The Quality Problem

Deceptive app ad practices drive lower quality installs — individuals that rarely or never use them, or who never make in-app purchases. Thus, deceptive advertising fraud significantly limits a brand’s efforts at attracting and retaining profitable users. In this way, every install or user action driven by deceptive advertising represents theft to your iOS or Android app business.

Protecting Your App Business From Deceptive App Advertising Fraud

Almost every fraud strategy, including deceptive ap advertising, results in a data anomaly, like seeing far more installs from one ad network than average.Because fraudsters are greedy, they often max out their use of a fraud strategy like deceptive advertising — their actions can thus be relatively easy to stop.

That said, you have to be looking for fraud to spot it. Because most app marketing teams struggle with the amount of data that pours into their organizations each day, it can sometimes be difficult to detect fraud before it has cost your business signifciantly.

In addition to data signals, it can also be useful to monitor your customer service feedback loop and any communities where your suers congregate. You will be amazed at how quickly people will report fraudulent mobile advertising and inform your team of problems. But again, you have to be listing to hear the messages.

Some app publishers are naturally concerned that deceptive ads might put their businesses at risk of consumer backlash, ANA fines, FTC actions, lawsuits and other legal claims, or other punitive actions. Frequent violations of deceptive ad practice policies can also get brands blacklisted — something no advertiser wants to see happen to their business. One step some brands take here is to require that any media source planning to make its own ads for your app submit the messages for approval before they are released. That won’t stop fraudsters intent of perpetrating bad trade practice– but can help you mitigate the risks of a well intentioned but overzealous ad network.

Singular and Mobile Ad Fraud Fraud

Deceptive app advertising is just one of the forms of fraud that Singular monitors and works to prevent for its clients. Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solutions that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

———–

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements:
Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business.
————

As mentioned above, the greed of would-be fraudsters is often the best tool we have to thwart them. The more they leverage a specific tactic to steal your money, the more visible will be the patterns and performance anomalies. Since Singular collects, cleans, enhances, and associates ad performance, cost and revenue data in a single place, our platform offers enormous power as a fraud detection and prevention emchanism.

With Singular, app publishers have visibility into ad performance, media investment, and revenue data. That provides unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

Singular monitors the flow of data into our platform, looking for signs of fraudulent activity and fraud schemes. W constantly scrutimize client data for peculiar performance and data patterns from ad networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more.

Further, Singular verifies every in-app purchase (IAP) with the appropriate app store to ensure that you recognize revenue from every reported purchase. With full uninstall insights right in the platform, Singular helps you identify sources and campaigns with suspiciously high uninstall rates. These are just a few of the ways that Singular helps protect our clients from fraud.

Mobile Ad Fraud Detection and Mobile Ad Fraud Prevention – Why Both Matter

As more and more marketers focus time and resources on mobile ad fraud, it’s important to talk about the best mix of approaches to protect your business. Broadly, there are two different kinds of fraud actions marketers and their mobile advertising partners can take:

  1. Fraud Detection Approaches: Fraud detection refers to technology and approaches designed to spot fraud and fraudulent activity in your data. Detection is about doing things after the fact of fraud.
  2. Fraud Prevention Approaches: Fraud prevention refers to ways in which we stop fraud from occurring or impacting our data. Prevention is about doing things before the fact of fraud.

These two concepts entered consumer pop culture in the US over the past several months as identity theft and identity fraud companies poked fun at competitors that focused on one or another approach. Here’s an example of one such ad.

While this commercial above discounts the value of detection as part of one’s protection strategy, the reality is that both detection and prevention play a critical role in protecting an individual or a business from fraud. In the context of the app industry, both detection and prevention play critical roles in protecting your marketing investments. Let’s explore the role that each should play for you.

The Key Role of Ad Fraud Detection

App fraud can affect your business in a variety of ways:

  • It can rob your business of marketing investment
  • It reduces your revenue and ability to monetize your IP
  • It creates major inaccuracies in your data
  • It inhibits your ability to optimize based on performance

Ad fraud detection helps to mitigate some of these dangers by identifying suspect actions so that marketers see them and can follow up. By constantly examining your marketing data for anomalies, suspicious patterns, and potentially fraudulent installs, events and purchases, fraud detection helps you to identify risks to your business along with pinpointing specific results that should be questioned or disputed.

With detection, the key to being able to spot possible fraudulent activity is granular data. We learn about bad actors and fraud tactics through ad fraud detection. The challenge of fraud detection is that the advertiser learns about fraud after it has impacted your business. It’s a great discovery tool, but does nothing to protect the advertiser from fraud as it occurs.

Different advertisers have different approaches to iPhone and Android ad fraud detection. One Singular innovation, is the ability to set alerts that will notify you when data anomalies warrant your attention.

The Key Role of Ad Fraud Prevention

Enter fraud prevention. Prevention helps protect a business by blocking fraud from affecting your business, data and bottom line. Some examples of ad fraud prevention include:

  • Automatically blocking IP addresses known to be used by cloud computing services from submitting app install or purchase signals. Such IP addresses don’t represent mobile web traffic — ergo, we know signals from them are likely fraudulent.
  • Blocking fraudulent sub-publishers from claiming app installs or post-install revenue events.
  • Automatically flagging any traffic whose timing indicates click spamming or the like.

Marketers love prevention strategies because these stop fraud before it occurs. This is clearly preferable to having to demand refunds or other corrective action from partners. Prevention is thus great when a business is under assault from previously detected fraudsters and fraud methodologies/

That said, prevention is far less effective at protecting an advertiser from new, rare, or more advanced fraud tactics. That’s because prevention by definition presupposes that a platform has been set to spot and block actions. That requires foreknowledge. New types of signals and patterns are much harder to prevent from impacting an Android or iPhone app business.

A Symbiotic Relationship Between Detection and Prevention

When you get granular and examine detection and prevention as concepts, it’s easy to see why both play a role in a robust anti-fraud strategy. Prevention can provide a barrier against known fraudulent actors and approaches, while detection can help identify new risks while ensuring that you can take corrective action where necessary to ensure the veracity of your data and revenue figures. In turn, detection can spot new forms of fraud that can then be stopped with new prevention approaches, rules and tactics.

Singular’s Approach: Fraud Detection AND Prevention

Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solution that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

Unlike some players in the attribution and analytics space, who focus on the easier and less costly detection side of anti-fraud, Singular combines detection and prevention in its antifraud offerings, with a robust emphasis on both approaches.

Singular monitors the flow of data into our platform, constantly evaluation all of the signals for signs of fraudulent activity such as illegitimate networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more.

In terms of purchase verification, Singular verifies every in-app purchase (IAP) with the appropriate app store to ensure that you recognize revenue from every reported purchase. With full uninstall insights right in the platform, Singular helps you identify sources and campaigns with suspiciously high uninstall rates. These are just a few of the ways that Singular helps protect our clients from fraud.

———–
Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements
Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business. Click for details.
————

Another key fraud advantage for Singular is the scale of its client footprint. Singular’s client base of many of the largest players in gaming, retail, travel, on demand services and other verticals gives us a massive data footprint to examine so that we can stay ahead of the curve and provide unprecedented levels of protections for our valued clients. With this extraordinary visibility into a large portion of the mobile app industry, Singular can detect and create prevention regimens with extraordinary speed and thoroughness as fraud approaches emerge and evolve.

Singular’s outstanding visibility into BOTH the ad performance and spend sides of the install category gives us unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

———–
Download the Singular Fraud Index

SIngular has just released its 2017 Singular Fraud Index, which reveals the mobile industry’s Most Secure Ad Networks. The Index is the first study of its kind to examine ad fraud data collected from multiple ad fraud prevention solutions, each with its own set of proprietary detection methods. Drawing on this unique dataset, the study exposes the effectiveness of today’s most common anti-fraud mechanisms as well as the 25 ad networks driving the lowest rates of digital advertising fraud.

Get your free copy here.
———–

Why Mobile App Uninstalls are Far More Prevalent in Developing Countries

As a mobile app attribution and data management services provider for a host of countries around the world, we see both commonalities and differences between the mobile app markets in different regions. One such difference is the frequency of uninstalls in developing versus developed economies.

Specifically, reported uninstall rates are higher in developing economies like India, China Brazil and Southeast Asia than in the EU or the US. Why? There are likely a variety of factors, including:

Phone Storage Size

The most popular phones in developing markets tend to have much smaller memories than those in developed economies. Many of the most popular phones, for example, have 1GB of memory, versus 16GB for the smallest iPhone 6. When a phone has a smaller memory, consumers must choose their apps carefully, or periodically uninstall apps they are not currently using in order to make room for other applications. They may choose to reinstall an app at a later date when the value proposition is more timely and urgent. But there are no guarantees that this will happen, which ultimately limits lifetime value. Further, it means a customer must be won over and over through marketing efforts and the Apple App Store and Google Play.

More Incentivized Mobile App Downloads

Many more app installs come via incentivized download programs in the developing world. App developers tend to use these platforms more in developing economies for different reasons, but it is clear that they have an impact. Free wifi for app download, free virtual goods for app download, and piggyback app downloads are quite common in developing markets. While some incentivized mobile app install programs attract high quality users, others drive installs with people who may ultimately have little interest in an app. Naturally, those  installs are much less likely to stick.

Network Issues That Appear to Be Product Issues

In markets where data service is spotty, it’s possible that a consumer will misinterpret network issues for app product issues. In those instances, uninstalls may be driven up even though the app itself is not faulty.

Lower Percentage of Paid Apps

Owing to greater price sensitivity as well as lower incidence of credit card usage, paid app penetration in the developing world tends to be lower. Paid apps, perhaps not surprisingly, have lower uninstall rates than free apps.

Whatever the reasons, it is clear that app uninstalls tend to be higher in places like India, China and Latin America than in the US or EU. But  uninstalls are an issue for a large proportion of apps across all regions, and marketers would be wise to better understand their uninstall rates, their sources of greater uninstalls, and the strategies to combat them.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

 

 

Ad Fraud Tutorial Series: What is Ad Fraud?

Definition: Ad fraud is the practice of deliberately attempting to drive ad impressions that have no potential of being seen by a real person. Digital ad fraud is a crime – it is deliberate, premeditated, and designed to rob advertisers of value for their advertising spend.

Digital Ad Fraud v. Bot Impressions

Much ad fraud is driven by bots – software designed to automate repetitive tasks online. Google, for example, uses bots to examine millions of pages and apps every day to understand what content they offer. They use this data so they can deliver the best possible results with their search engines.

Google bots are obviously not malicious. They are not designed to defraud advertisers, though it is possible that a Google bot can trigger an ad impression while doing its job.

Bot-driven ad fraud is different. These bots are deliberately developed to load ad views so that the criminal entity earns advertising dollars. So, impressions delivered to bots are not necessarily ad fraud. It is the malicious intent that makes some of them fraudulent.

How Digital Ad Fraud is Perpetrated

There are a multitude of ad fraud tactics, which include:

  • Bots that secretly take over consumer PCs and spawn pageviews unseen by the user.
  • Networks of hijacked computers (“botnets”) that fake consumer traffic.
  • Virtual machines that mimic consumer-used PCs and rapidly spawn thousands of pageviews.
  • Videos that automatically play but which are extremely small or even invisible on the page.
  • Software that emulates multiple clicks occurring every time a consumer makes a real click.

These are just a few of the methods used. Ad fraud, and fraud detection, is a continuing arms race, with each protection breakthrough spawning an innovative approach to perpetrating fraud.

How Prevalent is Ad Fraud?

All researchers who have studied ad fraud identify it as a significant amount of total web traffic. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and online fraud detection firm, White Ops, conducted one of the largest industry studies, in which data showed that 11% of display and 23% of video impressions were caused by bots and botnets. Another leading industry association, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), stated that almost 36% of web traffic was fake.

———–

Download the Singular Fraud Index

SIngular has just released its 2017 Singular Fraud Index, which reveals the mobile industry’s Most Secure Ad Networks. The Index is the first study of its kind to examine fraud data collected from multiple fraud prevention solutions, each with its own set of proprietary detection methods. Drawing on this unique dataset, the study exposes the effectiveness of today’s most common anti-fraud mechanisms as well as the 25 ad networks driving the lowest rates of fraud.

Get your free copy here.

———–

Protecting Yourself

It is important to be vigilant as regards monitoring for signs of fraud. Here are a few strategies to help you do just that:

  • Anti-Fraud Tools: Some attribution and analytics suites offer tools to help advertisers identify and prevent fraud. SIngular, for example, automatically offers many protections. Such tools may use signals like IP addresses, click and install pattern detection, and fraudulent activity monitoring to pinpoint campaigns, partners and buying models that are driving fraudulent app installs.
  • Common Sense: A deal that sounds too good to be true is likely to result in low-quality app installs.
  • Focusing Resources on Trusted Partners: Large or niche vertical media companies are more likely to have the scale and resources to detect and prevent fraud. Further, properties like social networks can leverage user account information to help ensure that installs come from legitimate people.
  • Leveraging Retention and Uninstall Data: By comparing the set of user traffic attracted by different media companies, brands can learn a lot about user quality. Low user retention or high uninstall rates increasingly are seen as signals of possible fraudulent activity.
  • Use ROI Analytics as a Primary KPI:.  Arguably, the best KPI to monitor and prevent fraud is ROI, or revenue divided by cost, as it is particularly difficult for fraudsters to simulate a sale, especially because most marketing analytics platforms — including Singular — verify in-app purchases with App Stores.

Singular and Ad Fraud

Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solutions that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

At Singular, our unprecedented visibility into BOTH the ad performance and spend sides of the install category gives us unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

———–

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements

Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business. Click for details.

————

Singular monitors the flow of data into our platform, looking for signs of fraudulent activity such as illegitimate networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more. Further, Singular verifies every in-app purchase (IAP) with the appropriate app store to ensure that you recognize revenue from every reported purchase. With full uninstall insights right in the platform, Singular helps you identify sources and campaigns with suspiciously high uninstall rates. These are just a few of the ways that Singular helps protect our clients from fraud.

Singular enables data-oriented advertisers to connect, measure, and optimize siloed marketing data, giving them the most vital insights they need to drive ROI. The unified analytics platform tracks over $7 billion in digital marketing spend to revenue and lifetime value across industries including commerce, travel, gaming, entertainment and on-demand services.

Mobile App Tracking: Here’s What You Should Track

Most of us understand intuitively that getting customer event data from our mobile apps is important and can help drive improved marketing effectiveness. But what specifically should we measure? How do we turn the good idea of measuring marketing activity into something that is both clear, focused and actionable?

For some, this post may feel a little “in the weeds.” But I am a big believer in helping marketers create a solid data foundation for everything that they do. Without mobile phone app attribution, many marketers have told us that they felt like they were flying blind. Once people see the value of app attribution, it’s critical to unlock its full power with an event measurement strategy that is robust, comprehensive, and clear.

I hope that by laying out a lot of specifics here with regard to the data to collect for iPhone and Android app tracking, that marketers who are considering app attribution solutions will be able to more fully grasp the importance of this unique set of data and ensure that they take full advantage of the data collection power of their attribution toolset.

Recommendations Based on Hundreds of Implementations

As a big player in marketing attribution across the cell phone app ecosystem, Singular has worked with many companies to set up their marketing attribution instances. Singular’s very low account churn rate attests to our success at helping clients create measurement plans that meet real business needs and drive significant improvement in ROI.

Getting started defining what you will measure with your Android and iPhone app tracking can feel like the hardest part of implementing an attribution solution like Singular’s. But trust me, that “difficulty” is more psychological than real. My goal with this post is to get rid of some of that discomfiture, so you can get up and running with your iOS and Android app tracking much faster.

Actions and Events

When you are just getting started with a measurement and attribution offering like that which is part of the Singular unified platform, the most important things you need to decide are which consumer actions you want to track. In the iPhone and Android device app industry, we call consumer actions “events”. By tracking events, we gather the data necessary to:

  • Understand the effectiveness of your marketing programs
  • Gain a genuine view into what consumers are doing in your apps

That’s mission-critical knowledge!

Different platforms allow their customers to track different numbers of events. Some allow only a handful of trackable event types, while others allow dozens – or more.  Singular allows advertisers to track up to 400 unique events per app version – an extremely large number for the category and one that makes us the choice of many of the most sophisticated mcommerce companies globally. These are businesses that understand the importance of complete and granular data.

It’s actually pretty simple to identify the kinds of events you need to track for mobile app tracking and analytics. At Singular, we advocate for tracking as many germane events as possible in order to facilitate richer understanding of your business and its key drivers. In fact, we actually created a pricing model that encourages this — by not charging marketers based upon the number of events that they track. That is an important difference for a mcommerce brand because it ensures that you don’t have to jack up your attribution fees for more granular data.

Types of Events That You Should Track

The first step in choosing the in-app actions to track is to identify the different types of events that every marketer should be tracking. Singular categorizes important marketing events into four categories.

Authentication Events– Events that help identify the user (anonymously, of course) so we can attribute an install to a device ID after your app has been installed in an app store.

Engagement Events– Actions that consumer takes that indicate involvement in the app and presage long-term usage over time.

Intent Events– Actions that indicate that the user is considering and preparing for a purchase. In other words, that making a purchase is on a metaphorical to-do list.

Purchase Events– Actions and information that are communicated after a purchase takes place. These conversion tracking metrics include characteristics of what was purchased. These help us get a richer and more comprehensive understanding of each individual anonymized customer.

Let’s dig into each of these event types:

Authentication Events

Authentication events allow the iOS or Android phone app marketer to gather user-level information that can be used for a variety of actions. Your primary goal with authentication events is to better understand the characteristics of the people that are using those specific instances of your app on their devices. These data points also help us – and other third party solutions providers – connect the actions that the customer takes in a mobile phone app with actions that they perform in other digital environments.

These cross-device connections build a more complete view of the customer and enable us to understand the interplay between different consumer touchpoints.

Some examples here include:

  • DEVICE ADVERTISING ID
  • CUSTOM ADVERTISER ID
  • AGE AND GENDER
  • LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE (IF RELEVANT)

Engagement Events

Engagement events provide the business owner insight into the extent to which the user has availed themselves of the app. These provide initial signals that a person is actively using the app. These events are helpful in identifying the quality users, both before and after a conversion takes place.

That matters even more than you might think when it comes to a mobile tracker. In certain mobile phone app verticals, a purchase might not happen for six to eight weeks after an install. In this case, tracking a user’s engagement within your app on their mobile device lets the marketer accurately optimize a network’s performance within days instead of waiting weeks. You simply optimize engagement events rather than conversion events.

Engagement events vary by the category in which you compete. Here are a few examples:

  • TUTORIAL VIEWED?
  • FILLED OUT SHOPPING PROFILE?
  • PRODUCT SEARCHES
  • WISH LISTING
  • WATCHED A PRODUCT VIDEO?
  • RATING SOMETHING IN THE APP
  • REVIEWING SOMETHING IN THE APP
  • RATING THE APP
  • SEND CONTENT TO A FRIEND/RECOMMEND APP
  • APP UPDATE INSTALLS

Intent Events

Intent events are useful in identifying users who are planning on making purchases (or taking other end actions) in the application. Like engagement events, the intent events can be used to identify quality users before a KPI occurs.

Perhaps more importantly, intent events can be used to remarket to users who have performed intent events but have yet to complete a purchase event. Including these events in your measurement plan will greatly increase the effectiveness of using remarketing ad network specialist Services…

Singular’s ability to send data to both re-marketing networks (via postbacks) and marketing automation tools through our Audiences offering gives the marketer complete discretion on how to use the data for re-marketing.

Here are a couple of examples of intent events:

  • ADD VIRTUAL GOOD TO CART
  • BEGIN CHECKOUT
  • INPUT CREDIT CARD INFO?

Purchase Events

Purchase or conversion events are obvious events to track, but capturing key attributes of the purchase events is also critical. In other words, you don’t simply want to know that someone bought but rather what they bought, how much they spent, and what contributed to the transaction. Tracking revenue at a user level allows the marketer to determine key metrics like Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU), or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for a specific marketing campaign.

Some examples:

  • TOTAL REVENUE
  • CATEGORY(S) OF ITEMS
  • QUANTITY OF ITEMS
  • NAME OF ITEMS
  • QUANTITY OF EACH ITEM
  • SKU OR OTHER ITEM NUMBERS
  • PRICE PAID PER ITEM
  • TAXES LEVIED
  • COLOR/SIZE OF ITEM
  • BOUGHT ON DISCOUNT?
  • SIZE OF DISCOUNT
  • GIFT?
  • LONGITUDE/LATITUDE

Conclusions

As I mentioned at the outset of this document, the key to taking those important first steps in mobile app measurement and attribution is to use a methodical and strategic approach to identifying the types of data that will help drive better decision-making. As you have seen, identifying events for tracking isn’t so difficult when you begin with a construct like:

  • Authentication Events
  • Engagement Events
  • Intent Events
  • Purchase or Conversion Events

With that in place, identifying the right events for your mobile attribution should be far easier. Naturally, every business is unique, and there is no substitute for expert advice. Singular clients can get additional assistance on defining the right set of events to track from their implementation and account management teams. Our people are product experts who can help speed the implementation process and ensure that you gather the right data – right from the beginning.

Ad Fraud Tutorial Series: What are App Install Farms?

As the iOS and Android app business grows, we are seeing more and more bad actors attempt to perpetrate advertising fraud on our industry.

This series of Singular blog posts is designed to provide brief tutorials more mobile device app advertisers on some of the key ways that advertising fraud is committed, as well as provide advice on how to reduce or mitigate the risk to your app business.


App Install Farms and App Store Rankings
“Farms” have been around almost as long as the digital industry. In the PC-centric Internet era, “click farms” were used to manipulate site rankings and affiliate marketing programs by artificially increasing click counts. In fact, click farms were for a time so prevalent that spoof sites like this grew enormously popular as a reaction. As mobile and mobile apps have come to dominate the digital space, a different class of “farm” has emerged in a big way: app install farms.


An app install farm uses a team of people (or technology) to install, launch, and then uninstall apps from devices. The process is then repeated by the farm employee so that it appears that an app is being installed by many people when the reality is that each install is fraudulent.

Early on, app install farms were knowingly used by some unscrupulous app publishers to manipulate rankings on the Apple App Store and Google Play. By radically increasing the install count for an app, an app install farm could help an app secure a top ten ranking. Top ranking g radically elevates the profile of an app and often drives many (legitimate) installs because consumers assume the app is strong.


Over time, the app stores caught on to this flagrant attempt to manipulate their data, so they adjusted their algorithms to reward brands that drive persistent installs and penalize brands that exhibit high immediate uninstall rates.


App Install Farms and Advertising Fraud

Today’s app store farms often help bad actor media companies artificially increase the number of ad-driven installs for a brand. Here’s how it works in 5 steps:

  1. The person first clicks on an ad for an app on each of the N devices s/he manipulates
  2. They then install the app on one of the app stores
  3. Then, when the app is downloaded, they launch the app to register the install with the brand or attribution provider
  4. They then uninstall the app
  5. Once uninstalled, they click on another ad and begin the process again

The team at a farm would be paid to click ads, then install an app and launch it, so that the media company could register a new install for payment under cost-per-install media schemes.

Driving false installs in this manner can be very profitable for the farmer/fraudster because Android and iPhone app publishers are often invest a great deal of money for installs. Industry estimates of the average cost of an install vary, but most estimates place the worldwide average at around $2. If an app farm worker could operate 100 devices and drive 25 installs per day per device, that means they could generate $5,000 per day for the farm.

Farm-based artificial installs have no value to an advertiser because they don’t represent the actions of consumers, yet they are likely to cost just as much as legitimate installs. That’s why it is so important to detect and prevent them.


App Install Farms Around the World

When we use the term app install farm, we are usually referring to an arrangement where people are used to install, launch, and uninstall apps. Because this is a labor-intensive job, but requires no formal education, such farms are far more likely to exist in developing countries than in the US or the European Union. However, some farms use technology to drive the installs rather than manual labor. Thusm these criminal enterprises exist all over the world.


App Install Farms and the “Ad Fraud Arms Race”

Battling against fraud is a constantly changing proposition because every time legitimate businesses find a way to detect and prevent fraud, fraudsters change their methods. For example, the classic app install farm formula – of rapidly installing, then launching, then uninstalling, and then repeating the process – meant that many installs were being credited to a single device advertising ID (IDFA or Google Advertising ID)

As advertisers began to block large numbers of installs from the same device advertising ID, fraudsters simply added an ID reset to their workflow. Now savvy anti-fraud actors must monitor their data for lots of new device IDs in addition to multiple installs on a single ID.

Protecting Yourself

It is important to be vigilant as regards monitoring for signs of advertising fraud. Here are a few strategies to help you do just that:

  • Anti-Fraud Tools: Some attribution and analytics suites offer tools to help advertisers identify and prevent fraud. SIngular, for example, automatically offers many protections. Such tools may use signals like IP addresses, click and install pattern detection, and activity monitoring to pinpoint campaigns, partners and buying models that are driving suspicious app installs.
  • Common Sense: A deal that sounds too good to be true is likely to result in low-quality app installs.
  • Focusing Resources on Trusted Partners: Large or niche vertical media companies are more likely to have the scale and resources to detect and prevent fraud. Further, properties like social networks can leverage user account information to help ensure that installs come from legitimate people.
  • Leveraging Retention and Uninstall Data: By comparing the set of user traffic attracted by different media companies, brands can learn a lot about user quality. Low user retention or high uninstall rates increasingly are seen as signals of possible fraudulent activity.
  • Use ROI Analytics as a Primary KPI:.  Arguably, the best KPI to monitor and prevent fraud is ROI, or revenue divided by cost, as it is particularly difficult for fraudsters to simulate a sale, especially because most marketing analytics platforms — including Singular — verify in-app purchases with App Stores.

Fighting advertising fraud isn’t easy, which is why so many companies turn to companies like Singular for help.

Singular and Ad Fraud

Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solution that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

At Singular, our unprecedented visibility into BOTH the ad performance and spend sides of the install category gives us unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best-known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

Singular monitors the flow of data into our platform, looking for signs of fraudulent activity such as illegitimate networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more. Further, Singular verifies every in-app purchase (IAP) with the appropriate app store to ensure that you recognize revenue from every reported purchase.

———–

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements

Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business. Click for details.

How to Build More Customer-Centric App Marketing Plans

As mobile vehicles have moved from a supporting to a starring role in brand experience, expectations about the quality and richness of these mobile experiences have grown dramatically. App marketing plans MUST reflect this new reality. While once mobile played primarily a DR role for most marketing efforts, these days brands expect digital media and experiences to carry a great deal of the water when it comes to protecting and enhancing the brand itself. Thus, apps have become an important component of a multi-channel business plan to differentiate a brand and drive customer loyalty.

Apps now represent fully half of connected customer time in the US, and even more in other parts of the world. Further, app users tend to be the most committed audience for a brand — its true believers. The meteoric growth in user mobile time spent has caught a large number of marketers off guard. As app developers and app publishers come to grips with the starring role that their creations now play in brand experience, we need to make a big shift in the way that we approach app marketing and app marketing strategy.

No More Siloed Mobile App Marketing Plans

Specifically, an app business needs to stop thinking about what happens in apps as a discrete experience, and recognize that in-app user experiences are now powerful parts of  integrated, customer-centered brand journeys. App companies must both recognize and reflect this truism to drive maximum ROI.

Users don’t think about a brand’s messages in one medium as somehow separate from brand experiences that take place in another. Whether users are visiting your page on the app store, reviewing messages in social media, viewing pieces of mobile app marketing, or having analog or real-world brand experiences, people think about a brand as a single entity.

We should actually thank our lucky stars for that, because the huge number of digital marketing options has led to a Balkanization of media, as channel experts creating what are often distinct consumer touch points, with insufficient regard paid to the whole brand experience. OK, on some level that sentence makes it sound worse than it is, because marketers instinctively work toward building a brand with an integrated marketing mix even if all of the components of a marketing program are not overtly coordinated. But it is not at all unusual for mobile app marketing teams to operate separately from marketers focused on other channels.

Holistic Brand Experience

As we create new app concepts for mobile devices, and explore new ways to meet consumer needs with apps, we need to take the long view – one that thinks about brand experience holistically, and apps as integral tools that help guide customers through their marketing journey.

Now, lots of mobile apps are the alpha and omega of their brands and companies – games, for example, often live only in the app realm. But lots of other apps have been developed by brands that connect with customers in a myriad of different ways. We need to develop marketing plans and mobile marketing strategies that carefully consider all of the ways that an app could fit into the larger customer experience. Not just view them as alternative estores but rather as tools that serve a broad range of purposes for users.

In terms of app marketing plans, strategy and measurement, Singular is leading in helping marketers integrate the insights that they get from all channels and action them across all elements of their marketing campaigns. We have 1,600+ pre-built integrations,so that:

 

  • Marketers can add marketing platforms and partners to their mixes without integrating new SDKs, if they wish
  • App user data can be integrated into broader BI systems
  • A mobile-first company’s cross-channel marketing automation tools can deliver tailored messages based on the actions people take in apps and other media

 

As goes app marketing plans, app information is most useful when it can be combined with other data sets, and when it can be made immediately actionable in the platforms you already use and love. This helps ensure both an integrated brand experience and a marketing budget that is aligned to the same goals and metrics.

Note: This blog post was published first on the Apsalar blog, prior to Apsalar’s merger with Singular. Company informaiton has been updated. Learn more about our united company at Singular.net.

 

Singular enables data-oriented marketers to connect, measure, and optimize siloed marketing data, giving them the most vital insights they need to drive ROI. The unified analytics platform tracks over $7 billion in digital marketing spend to revenue and lifetime value across industries including commerce, travel, gaming, entertainment and on-demand services.For more information, click here.

If you’d like to learn more or see a demo of the Singular unified analytics platform, get in touch.